I think it’s easy to get dragged down in the maw of unsafe memory access here, because most of us have come from some C-based language where that’s the only option. Personally I think that’s a mistake in most cases. One of the main goals of Swift is safety, and if you parse incoming data using the same style as you’d use in C, you are likely to suffer from the same exploitable memory management bugs as C.
Hence my post on the thread you referenced, outlining a completely different, and much safer, way to approach this problem. It’s not applicable in all cases, but IMO you should default to this approach, leaving the unsafe, C-style code for situations where profiling has shown that you absolutely need it.
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Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ DTS @ Apple